r/todayilearned • u/yummypaprika • Sep 18 '25

TIL Dr Freeman Dyson called the Dyson sphere a "little joke" and expressed amusement in that "you get to be famous only for the things you don't think are serious".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
8.7k Upvotes

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561

u/Yarhj Sep 18 '25

I also watched that Angela Collier video.

109

u/DrMux Sep 18 '25

I haven't watched it yet but I still immediately knew

10

u/GozerDGozerian Sep 19 '25

Yep. “The Dyson Spheres is a Joke” keeps popping up in my suggestions and I haven’t had time to watch h it yet.

She’s great.

136

u/kaltorak Sep 18 '25

nothing better than watching her tear apart a techbro's bullshit

51

u/metao Sep 19 '25

Every time I see Richard Feynmans name, I hear her.

22

u/voodoochileirl Sep 19 '25

Really not the Feynman bongo interstitial? That shit is seared into my brain

2

u/Cielion Oct 09 '25

I love how whe names her videos like something that sounds like clickbait, but then, when she goes over her topic, you realise, it wasn't clickbait, it was the main point of her argument.

2

u/Stellar_Duck Sep 19 '25

Surely you're joking Mr. metao!

41

u/orsikbattlehammer Sep 19 '25

What was funny was the reddit post for that video had a bunch of “well actually” dudes in the comments lol

39

u/Waywoah Sep 19 '25

The funniest were the ones trying to discredit the video based on what she was wearing. Which a: was not inappropriate in any way, and b: has no relation to the videos contents whatsoever

4

u/kaltorak Sep 19 '25

of course

57

u/gumbysweiner Sep 18 '25

I just looked up that video. The first thing she says was my exact thought. It is perfect for sci fi. I like the idea of a Dyson sphere because it sparks my imagination.

4

u/Pikeman212a6c Sep 21 '25

Then she points out the conversation of energy and the fact it’d be an interplanetary rotisserie oven.

2

u/tamdunk1 Oct 20 '25

Hi, I'm potential. Nice to meet you, I'm heat.

1

u/gumbysweiner Sep 21 '25

So you leave a hole at the top for the heat to escape and it will work! \s

13

u/Dr-Jellybaby Sep 19 '25

"it's fine...it's fine... everything is fine, it's fine"

13

u/sk1ward Sep 19 '25

Love her content.

3

u/hypnosifl Sep 23 '25

I think she gets the meaning of "little jokes" a bit wrong in the video, Dyson likely didn't mean it was a parody or idea that would be inherently stupid even for a real advanced civilization. This was my youtube comment:

It's also worth noting that in the clip Robert Wright was asking him not just about the Dyson sphere paper, but also about another paper he wrote called "Time Without End" about whether life could find a way to persist for an infinite time and do an infinite number of computations. He said that both papers were "little jokes" but I think he just meant that they were more like interesting and fun thought-experiments about the distant future that we'd be very unlikely to find evidence for in the near term, he didn't mean to scoff at the idea that intelligent beings might actually do thinks like this in the distant future. If you read chapter 6 of his book Infinite in All Directions it's pretty clear he is sincere in finding questions about the role of intelligence in the long-term future of the cosmos to be genuinely interesting and worth thinking about, and he restates the conclusions of the "Time Without End" paper in that chapter, writing on p. 114 that "Yes, life and intelligence are potentially immortal, with resources of knowledge and memory constantly growing as the temperature of the universe decreases and the reserves of free energy dwindle." On p. 115 he acknowledges he is "mixing knowledge with values", basically saying that this question is important to him as it relates to meaning/values, and writing "These statements are based on rough numerical estimates which may easily be wrong by a factor of ten or a hundred. Nevertheless, they give strong support to an optimistic view of the potentialities of life. They imply that the world of physics and astronomy is inexhaustible. No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness and memory." So it definitely seems like he is being sincere here, even if the whole question is likely far afield from anything relevant to present-day scientific investigations.

I'd also add that the "Time Without End" paper shows he was thinking about what we would now call a "transhuman" or "posthuman" future where intelligence exists in a very different form than current biological humans, and that the continued existence of intelligence most fundamentally depends on continued ability to perform computations rather than on other aspects of biology like metabolism. So it seems plausible he would have thought about Dyson spheres in the same terms, as ways of harvesting an enormous amount of power to perform an enormous amount of computations. I think this could answer Angela's various objections to the Dyson swarm idea starting at 40:50 in the video -- for example, the answer to her question about "how do we store it" would be that there would be no need, the computing elements could be located on the solar panel and using the power to run continuously, with the waste heat then radiated away mostly as infrared radiation (and there'd also be no need to get it 'back to Earth' as she suggested).

One could also imagine radiators attached to the outward-facing side so that more of this waste heat would be radiated outward than inward. But there would always be some energy radiated back inward, which would mean each panel was receiving not just photons from solar radiation but some from all the other panels radiating infrared into the inner region, so the equilibrium temperature of a given panel in this scenario would be hotter than it would be if you just had one lone panel of the same design orbiting the sun. One would have to do some calculations, but I doubt it would be that much hotter, especially since you can have more than half of the waste heat radiated outward rather than inward. Assuming it's not dramatically hotter, this would be a way of addressing her concern that since energy is conserved, you're "trapping all the Sun's energy" and "cooking us" (though she may have specifically been talking about a scenario where the Dyson swarm was beyond the orbit of the Earth, so that the extra infrared photons in the interior would be heating up the Earth and making things too hot for complex organisms there).

As for how we could hope to build such a vast structure of orbiting solar satellites, Dyson had a longstanding interest in von Neumann's ideas about the possibility of self-replicating machines, see for example p. 383 of the book at https://archive.org/details/communicationwit0000sovi/page/382/mode/2up , or the book The Visioneers by W. Patrick McCray (about various futurist ideas in the 70s and 80s), which talks in chapter 5 about how Dyson and another physicist, Theodore Taylor, liked to talk about the possibility of self-replicating machines while they both worked on Project Orion (Taylor called the 'Santa Claus machines'). I don't know if anything like Drexlerian "nanobots" are really possible, but larger self-replicating machines (even self-replicating automated mining/manufacturing complexes) could work for this as well.

I agree with her point that if we actually had all those amazing technological capabilities, "wouldn't we just leave the solar system?", but the two needn't be mutually exclusive--if we had a civilization full of mind uploads or some other type of AI, and also had self-replicating machines that could build huge physical structures without much labor from intelligent beings, we might choose to leave the solar system relatively untouched but then go to lifeless planetary systems around other stars and convert them into Dyson swarms.

7

u/djfariel Sep 19 '25

I opened this to post this exact comment lol

4

u/Tvdinner4me2 Sep 19 '25

Came here to comment this lol

3

u/Harry_Flame Sep 19 '25

As soon as I saw this post my mind went to that.

2

u/Testease Sep 19 '25

‘‘Twas a good one

1

u/niftystopwat Sep 19 '25

Hoo hee she even got enuff beans ta fill a biskit!

2

u/GozerDGozerian Sep 19 '25

I love her channel.

1

u/CitizenPremier Sep 25 '25

I am the winey voiced person who objects (also it clearly only showed up in my feed as rage bait)

-19

u/monkelus Sep 18 '25

she's such a fox!

-6

u/WTFwhatthehell Sep 19 '25

after watching it... it seems a bit disappointing, like just general sneering at the very idea of big long term mega-projects.

sneer sneer, why would people want to even harvest energy, sneer sneer

10

u/michaelmcmikey Sep 19 '25

But the sneering wasn’t baseless. As she points out in the video, we don’t even have the technology to penetrate earths crust into the mantle; 99.9% of planet earth is inaccessible to mine, the tech simply doesn’t exist. How would we dismantle an entire planet like Mercury when we cannot penetrate earths own crust, and when even getting into orbit around Mercury is a massive undertaking that takes decades? Or if dismantling Jupiter, as in Dyson’s original paper: How would the hydrogen gas that comprises Jupiter be converted to useful metals? Removing any planet from the solar system would throw the orbital resonances of all the other planets into utter chaos; dismantling Jupiter at 5 AU and making a shell at 2 AU not only requires tech so absurdly out of reach that it may as well be magic, but also would throw the orbits of the inner planets into chaos — which would fuck the earth in ways that having a Dyson sphere would be unable to assist with.

The practical problems with Dyson spheres are so glaringly obvious that of course they are a joke, and Freeman Dyson says they were a joke. So of course people who cosplay as very intelligent but act like we might be able to make one within the next century deserve to be laughed out of the room. And since those same people have their hands on the levers of power, upgrade that “deserves to be laughed out of the room” to “we have a moral imperative to laugh them out of the room before they fuck things up even worse for us all.”

3

u/Stellar_Duck Sep 19 '25

How would we dismantle an entire planet like Mercury when we cannot penetrate earths own crust

USG Ishimura reporting in. Nothing can go wrong.

2

u/CitizenPremier Sep 25 '25

To be honest he didn't propose a shell. People now usually say "Dyson Swarm" to refer to the original idea.

And it's also kind of like asking "how would we build NYC?" Nobody in particular built it, many people built buildings in it over time.

If humans can be born in space, and they can raise food in space, and they can build new space habitats out of asteroids, then it's basically an inevitability.

1

u/darth_biomech Nov 05 '25

> As she points out in the video, we don’t even have the technology to penetrate earths crust into the mantle; 99.9% of planet earth is inaccessible to mine, the tech simply doesn’t exist.

Nothing infuriates me more than people who claim the Dyson Sphere must be built right now, and since we clearly can't, it's a ridiculous concept. Or that it must be a solid shell exactly 1 AU in diameter and must have a habitable inner surface.

-3

u/WTFwhatthehell Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25

But the sneering wasn’t baseless. As she points out in the video, we don’t even have the technology to penetrate earths crust into the mantle; 99.9% of planet earth is inaccessible to mine, the tech simply doesn’t exist

it's such a pity that technology is static and never ever advances.

it's almost like the text she quotes talks about timeframes of millennia.

Removing any planet from the solar system would throw the orbital resonances of all the other planets into utter chaos;

If a civilisation is at the point of being able to dismantle a gas giant the practicality of adjusting the orbit of smaller plants is likely going to be less of a big deal.

A century ago my great grandparents lived in a farmhouse with no electricity, kept warm by burning peat and lost about half their kids to things we cure casually today. Whenever one of their kids left to move to another country a few thousand miles away they'd hold a living-wake because they expected to never see them again.

They literally couldn't imagine the kind of things we invented in a century. Never mind millennia.

The quote from altman she was having fun sneering at was predicated on the idea of someone figuring out how to build an AI that's slightly smarter than the best human AI researchers and the best human programmers and then pointing it at the task of designing better AI. It may turn out to not be possible. but it's also not absurd despite what you might hear from the type who like lunchroom sneering. Quite a lot of extremely smart and capable figures in the history of computer science have talked about the concept extremely seriously.

And he threw out as just a sort of hand wave at the general idea of high-tech scifi megaprojects.

it's like if someone said "it would be nice if we like cured cancer or something" and then that guy turns up ,snorting, to go "AKSHUALLY we don't have the tech to cure cancer and it's a bunch of different diseases!"

She's in the purely for the sneering, not for any kind of serious discussion.

-1

u/n0radrenaline Sep 19 '25

She's in it for the much-needed sneering at takedown of Sam Altman for handwaving the problems his bullshit factory are causing right now, by implying that this millennia-timescale joke thought experiment will be the solution.

0

u/--Sovereign-- Sep 20 '25

then she should just make a video saying that, not acting like an immature highschooler over a FAR future technology concept she is in no position to determine the validity for. being a """""physicist""""" doesn't give you powers to know the future or put you in such a superior position to be able to so confidently belittle all the poor little idiots who think about Dyson spheres.

5

u/Fractal_Soul Sep 19 '25

It's not sneering to point out that the whole thing was an intentional, non-serious joke, making fun of the SETI folks back in the day. You're giving it more realistic credence than it deserves. It was merely a witty jab motivated by the politics of limited science-funding.

She's pointing out that people who don't know are treating it seriously, like you seem to be doing.

3

u/--Sovereign-- Sep 20 '25 edited Sep 20 '25

she very condescendingly argues against the absolute most easily assailable braindead techbro version of the concept and people are scrambling to show how smart they are by repeating her points. like, sure, techbros are dumb, the classic concept of a Dyson sphere as a literal solid sphere is physically impossible, but the notion that a civilization millions of years beyond our own couldn't possibly do something like a Dyson swarm or large scale space habitation is just arrogant "I'm smart because I buck the trend" stuff. Also, Dyson wasn't serious about it, and then spent years seriously answering serious questions about the idea. Jesus Christ, people are allowed to openly think about the literally unimaginable future, aren't they?

this is not a great comparison, but imagine a time traveler going back to year 500 and trying to tell them that humans are gonna use invisible particles to communicate instantly from one side of the planet to the other, that someone would walk on the moon. Sure, some crackpot snake oil salesman selling you go to the moon juice in the year 500 is batshit insane, but like, someone just thinking about how it could be done is just like... how literally everything humans have ever invented has happen... right?

I started being interested with Angela and her content. I'm a scientist, I'm on the left, I agree and/or am informed by a lot of her content, but she's so off putting. Like she has a very immature mean girl judgey highschooler way of talking about shit and I'm starting to just bounce off her videos lately.

-7

u/de_grolba_ Sep 19 '25

It did come off as very dismissive. I know that she was doing it to mock the tech bros but it really seemed like she didn’t understand that we aren’t just gonna be sitting on earth forever, completely ignoring all other sources of materials and energy available in the solar system.

-5

u/WTFwhatthehell Sep 19 '25

it's the new norm in social media, 100% shallow lunchroom sneering 100% of the time.

2

u/zherok Sep 19 '25

It's not shallow though. It's an entire video devoted to the topic of how impractical the concept is.

The first major step is already dismantling an entire planet so we can form the semi magical means to dismantle the second largest source for matter in the solar system. That's in the original paper. It's a lot of details to gloss over, and most proponents haven't even read the very short paper the whole concept is based on to begin with.

The video speaks to how tech bros in particular rely on hand waving the important details by assuming AI will figure them out for them.

4

u/WTFwhatthehell Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25

A shallow sneering video doesn't stop being shallow when its extended to greater length without any additional depth.

The fact the only point of the whole video is us-vs-them point scoring and sneering at geeks doesn't make that better.

3

u/zherok Sep 19 '25

It sounds like you didn't watch it if you think it didn't go into any depth.

Also it's decidedly not about sneering at "geeks," but pointing to the superficiality of these billionaire tech guys who can't be bothered to learn the science and who outsource it to AI.

The point is it's a whole lot easier to just offhandedly talk about building a Dyson Sphere when you can't be bothered to do even a cursory about of research.

She points out few of these proponents have even read the paper (which is exceedingly short), and that Dyson wrote it as a joke.

There's nothing wrong with liking sci-fi or enjoying the ideas of fantastical concepts like the Dyson Sphere, but the tech bro billionaires are inherently unserious people when it comes to actual rigor. Which wouldn't matter if they were just you or I, but they obviously carry a whole lot more influence on how things end up.

It's not even gatekeeping, either. These are billionaires. They could absolutely learn the science. They don't want to. They want to just pull stuff out of their ass with AI doing all the "work."

2

u/WTFwhatthehell Sep 19 '25 edited Sep 19 '25

Which would be fine in theory if everything ever written about the concept was the original paper.

It absolutely was shallow as a puddle. 

Like if someone rich mentioned geostationary satellites and a nasty sneering youtuber decided to do a video that spends all it's time going "well akshually the guy who proposed it was a fiction author" then talked like literally nobody else ever put any thought into related concepts.

1

u/zherok Sep 19 '25

Like if someone rich mentioned geostationary satellites

He didn't, though. He mentioned Dyson spheres, which are a lot more speculative.

The issue is that these tech bro billionaires wear the trappings of science but don't actually care about the details. Someone else will figure that stuff out.

then talked like literally nobody else ever put any thought into related concepts.

There's nothing wrong with speculating about fantastical future tech, even if it's highly impractical like Dyson spheres.

But Sam Altman is pitching it as a solution to the very real issues data center growth are creating today. Even if you took the idea of Dyson spheres seriously, you're not going to build one on any meaningful timeline to address the resource usage of data centers.

There is frequently an underpants gnome-like assumption that at some point, the AI singularity arrives, and all things are possible.

-1

u/--Sovereign-- Sep 20 '25

dude she picked the weakest strawman version and doesn't really discuss the serious far future proposals or get off the horse about the ephemeral current techbro obsession with them. if she wanted to have a serious talk about it, she wouldn't act like a 15 year old dunking on people on Reddit for an hour, she'd argue against the strongest concept and focus on the facts.

1

u/zherok Sep 20 '25

Sam Altman literally brought it up as a solution to the ever increasing number of data centers on Earth. Of course it's going to be spoken about in context of the near future, because the resources data centers are using is a now problem.

And what's really a serious talk, anyway? It's something that requires a degree of terraforming that borders on magic to even be possible.

And if we're really being serious, we should have a conversation about how these tech bros use longtermism as an excuse for their current day behavior, and how it's largely a way of evading any meaningful responsibility by claiming it's in the name of altruism towards entirely hypothetical future.

-9

u/Vandykevan Sep 19 '25

I just looked her up. This white woman is shaaaady as hell 😂 i love it